Christian Persecution and Regime Change

Michael Gerson is unhappy that democracy promotion gets some of the blame for the persecution of Christians:

The growth of this persecution is sometimes used as a club against the very idea of democracy promotion. Middle East democracy, the argument goes, often results in oppressive Sunni religious ascendancy. Majority rule will bring the harsh imposition of the majority faith.

But this is the criticism of a caricature.

No, it is a criticism of the results of policies that Gerson and other advocates of democracy promotion have supported for more than a decade. Advocates for democracy promotion may intend something else, but in practice majoritarian and illiberal democracy is typically what takes root. The “caricature” is certainly a fair description of what happened to Christians in Iraq, who were exposed to Islamist persecution following the invasion and whose communities have been devastated by the last decade of violence and threats.

Of course, the real issue in many of these cases is not democracy promotion by itself, but the desire to topple governments that are already in place. It is the security vacuum and the resulting empowerment of armed fanatics during and after regime change that do the most to threaten the safety and well-being of Christians and other minorities across the region, and yet there are those like Gerson that pretty consistently argue in favor of creating greater instability and chaos by backing the overthrow of foreign governments. Minorities are always likely to be vulnerable during rapid and violent political change, and the record of many of the loudest advocates of democracy promotion has been to urge on just this sort of change in the Near East and elsewhere.

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22 Responses to Christian Persecution and Regime Change

When chaos erupts in Middle Eastern nations, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, etc., armed fanatics seem to fill the power vacuum and go after Christians and other religious minorities. It happens in country after country, and it may not be by design, but it happens, and we should be learning this by now. It seems that there are not that many Thomas Jeffersons in the closet in the Middle East, ready to leap out and install “democracy.”

Given the choice between secular tyrants and Islamist fanatics, I think I’ll take the secular tyrants.

And I thought to myself: “Why not get in bed with Assad?” The guy’s definitely not nice, and the author is probably not far off the mark in cataloging the ways that Assad has contrived to strengthen the Jihadis in order to discredit the Syrian rebels as a whole.

That said, if the author thinks that Assad is somehow worse than the Islamists would be, he should recall what Afghanistan was like under the Taliban. Assad is practically an angel by comparison. He also offers no specifics whatsoever as to how we should carry out his preferred policy, which is the “empowerment of mainstream Syrian rebels.”

Again, why shouldn’t we hope that Assad prevails at this point? With the “mainstream” opposition clearly impotent and nearly irrelevant, the two options appear to be Assad or a new version of the Taliban.

Gerson is little more than a Christian-Zionist. If Israel wants something, then Gerson does as well. And he shares the reverse domino phobia that the neocons have that if the US starts withdrawing from one conflict that it will start the retreat into “isolationism.”

“Given the choice between secular tyrants and Islamist fanatics, I think I’ll take the secular tyrants.”

I couldn’t agree more. Of course, the McCains of the world will not tolerate those who value “stability” (it’s amazing how they think that’s a dirty word) over all the chaos that comes with a revolution. They simply can’t conceive of the idea that there are no good guys, or that we don’t have to take sides.

I don’t want to make too much of this but I think it is relevant: Bush II cast his war against terror as a new Crusade until it became clear the term was not good Public-Relations-wise. Despite all the PR-driven protestations that the US was not waging war against Muslims, many pundits and politicos made it clear that they saw the War on Terror as precisely a war on Islam, or “Islamofascism”, with plenty of loaded comparisons between “peaceful” Christianity (well demonstrated by the Bush gang’s bellicosity) and “warlike” Islam. And at the grassroots level there was never any doubt that the wars were anything but a holy war against Muslims.

Chances are, given their often-admitted awareness of divisions within Islam, the warmakers were unaware that there are a lot of Christians in the Middle East, who’d be seen, however unfairly, as brethren of the Christians who invaded and bombed and destroyed their countries. I sure don’t remember any notice being taken of that, or of concern at the top for Middle Eastern Christians who would surely be easy scapegoats for anger at US Christian violence.

The people who buy our war policies are not motivated by religious concerns. They put profit before people, so it’s not surprising that the propaganda they push to fool the rest of us into approving, is cynical BS for the Bubbas.

point made by Duncan Mitchel is so very correct. During the last 20 years or so, many Christians, esp Evangelicals, have openly and loudly promoted an alliance with Israel against Muslims. Some of them are more fervent that Zionist Jews! It should be noted that during centuries of wars between Ottomons and Europeans, and all the years of colonization during 19th and 20th centuries by Europeans, Muslims in general did not consider Christians to be their enemy per se. Unfortunately, now more and more people in the Islamic world are being convinced of the existential enmity between the followers of the two faiths. That is a very dangerous and unfortunate outcome, and one that must be resisted by wiser people on both sides.

There’s a lot clearer and more obvious reason that Gerson is not just wrong but *knows* he is wrong and knows that further “democracy promotion” especially in the Middle East is likely to just produce more Christian persecution and that is “democracy” itself almost assures. it.

Unless democracy is coupled with a strong element of minority rights, to minorities living under such systems democracy can itself almost by definition feel like persecution.

So there’s these Evangelicals and others like Gerson, knowing first of all that their targets have at best only the most minimal grasp on what democracy itself means and then to the precise point absolutely no sense of minority rights whatsoever, happily putting their co-religionist’s necks on the chopping block because the Bible says this or that about Israel.

Not to mention happily putting our necks on the chopping block fighting all their wars.

There’s no excuse for the religious for this, and less and less so for the more sophisticated like Gerson. They *know* that democracy in many of these places means the high-jump for Christians. They’ve just sold them out and rationalized doing so because of the advantages of being a neo-con today in Washington.

Michael Gerson clearly is well aware the foolish promotion of “democracy”, as justification of the illegal invasion of Iraq, produced catastrophe for the Christian communities of Iraq. Was was amply forecoast prior to the illegal invasion in 2003.

The policy is sold for the benefit of the good-hearted American public as democracy promotion, but that’s the convenient Orwellian euphemism masking the real policy of regime change for countries not towing the financial elites’ line. Any democracy that results from regime change is quickly undermined, in favor of a totalitarian or authoritarian regime that is amenable to those interests. That is why anomalies like US funding of the military that overthrew Egypt’s democracy and US funding of Al Qaeda rebels fighting the Syrian government occur – it appears quite mad, unless one realizes that “Why We Fight” is not the story being sold to we the people.

Of the many dumb things you will read in this article, this one deserves special attention:

“One of America’s oddest failures in recent years,” argue Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, “is its inability to draw any global lessons from its unique success in dealing with religion at home. It is a mystery why a country so rooted in pluralism has made so little of religious freedom.”

First, it isn’t unique, and it’s really not even ours. Our cultural inheritance from the English includes their experience with criminalizing certain theologies depending on the whims of the monarch, from Henry Tudor’s suppression of Catholics after dissolving pro-Papacy monastic orders and enforcing a substitute mass in English rather than Latin; to Mary Tudor’s burnings of Protestants under the Heresy Acts; to laws forbidding Catholics from holding certain offices or worshipping in public under the Tudors and Stuarts both; to the English Civil War that ended in a Protestant Parliament sentencing a Catholic monarch to death. England bled a great deal before policy shifted from killing and marginalizing adherents of the other religion to tolerance in the name of political stability. Americans didn’t need to bleed for the First Amendment’s wisdom to become apparent, because their ancestors had already done so.

Political institutions become institutions because of tradition owing to experience. Egypt doesn’t have a tradition of self-governance, let alone one wherein a strong central government is limited by other institutions. Still less does it have a tradition of tolerating religious expression because the alternatives are worse in the minds of its people. Why would we expect so much more of Egypt than we do of our ancestors at a similar stage in their political development?

It’s not a thought being openly voiced by the US State Department or the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but a week ago the highly respected former US diplomat Ryan Crocker told the New York Times that it was time “to start talking to the Assad regime again”.

“As bad as he is,” Mr Crocker said, “he is not as bad as the jihadis who would take over in his absence.”

I continue to think the “domocracy promotion” fallacy was part of the duping of George W. Bush, to enable illegal invasion of Iraq to move forward. As sought by Bibi Netanyahu.

Bush the Lesser was hardly duped. He wanted a second Iraq war well before September 11. He seems to have been motivated, in part, by his own Freudian struggles with his father. He also apparently equated “great president” with “war president”.

The problem for ideologues of any ideology is that their politics becomes akin to religion and anyone who doesn’t share their ideology is a heretic and anyone who criticizes or questions the fruits of the ideology is someone who hates “freedom and democracy”. For those of us who know Christians from the Middle East and understand a little about Middle Eastern Christianity and the fragile situation that many Arab Christians find themselves in we could tell you from the beginning what was going to happen to the Christians of Iraq and now what is happening to Christians in Egypt and Syria. The handwriting was on the wall and that is literal in the case of Syria where the anti-Assad Rebels wrote of their intention to send “Christians to Beiruit and Alawites to the Wall (meaning firing squad)” and that was written on walls of apartment complexes in Homs before the Syrian Civil War began.

“…As William Inboden of the University of Texas notes, there is a robust correlation between religious persecution and national security threats. ‘Including World War II,’ argues Inboden, ‘every major war the United States has fought over the past 70 years has been against an enemy that also severely violated religious freedom.’ The reverse is equally true. ‘There is not a single nation in the world,’ he says, ‘that both respects religious freedom and poses a security threat to the United States.’”

Assuming the second point is true (the first point, I think, is somewhat dubious), how does this support Gerson’s case? The whole point is that the dictators, the targets of the neo cons pseudo “democrats,” DO, at least to a large extent, respect religious freedom, and it is the revolutionaries bankrolled by the crypto US governmental agencies which, when they win, tend to curtail it, or, at a minimum, can’t or won’t stop religious persecution.

Iraq is a case in point. Iraqi Christians, if not exactly flourishing under Saddam, were not being persecuted to the point of extinction, as they are now, under the “democrats.” Same with Assad and the Syrian Christians.

Moreover, it is actually IS true, ironically, I’m sure are far as Gerson is concerned, if not also this Imboden, that neither Saddam nor Assad pose any national security threat to the USA either.

There are, apparently, some far-right activists from countries like Greece who are going to Syria to fight on Assad’s side. What is their motivation? Are they seeking to protect their fellow Christians (a la the Crusades)? Or is it more like, we will defend anyone Israel and/or the Sunnis don’t like?

Both of these groups primarily exist to provide self-defense for the Syriac (Oriental Orthodox) population.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find very much information about these groups online. Are they purely self-defense organizations, or are they more, um, “ethically questionable”? Would they accept private donations? If so, and if there are no legal/ethical issues with doing so, I suspect a lot of readers of this and other similarly-minded publications might consider donating in order to make a difference. It’d be better than just sitting back and doing nothing while Christians get massacred over there.

“Both of these groups primarily exist to provide self-defense for the Syriac (Oriental Orthodox) population.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find very much information about these groups online. Are they purely self-defense organizations, or are they more, um, “ethically questionable”? Would they accept private donations? If so, and if there are no legal/ethical issues with doing so, I suspect a lot of readers of this and other similarly-minded publications might consider donating in order to make a difference. It’d be better than just sitting back and doing nothing while Christians get massacred over there.”

The Military Council (MFS) and Sutoro are essentially self-defense organizations. They work closely in cooperation with the Kurdish YPG militia who control a big chunk of northeastern Syria. They get a lot of support from the Syriac diaspora in Europe. I wish I knew how to support them financially, but I don’t, and I would be a bit nervous about doing so. Given the current administration’s treatment of the Romeike family and the Little Sisters of the Poor, I would not put it past the DOJ to bring a case against someone for donating to MFS and Sutoro.